ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the direct relationship between black advancement and white backlash, and why black academics are in the crosshairs. The limited capacity of this chapter on public attacks cannot properly account for internal attacks, in which enmeshed racism from colleagues, students, and administrators often mirrors, triggers, pre-empts, or mimics attacks from the outside. Blood thirst for ritualistic violence has long been emblematic of the ways white supremacy is organized, maintained, and, most importantly, used to terrorize, thwart, and annihilate blacks that were seen as making social and political gains. The specificity of attacks on black academics, then, is driven by anti-blackness, not anti-intellectualism. Black academics have long suffered from racism in every political age and climate, but anti-black violence must be understood, in all its forms, as white America desperately clinging to its past: an essential ritual that reaffirms and reproduces white power, hegemony, and identity across region, political leanings, and otherwise changing times.
